On 13 November 1872, from the window of his hotel in Le Havre, Claude Monet painted a view of the port through the mist. Exhibited two years later under the title Impression, soleil levant [Impression, Sunrise] (1872, Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet), the work inspired critic Louis Leroy to coin the term “Impressionist”, thus giving a name to the group formed by Monet and his friends.
In 2022, the Musée Marmottan Monet celebrates the 150th anniversary of the centrepiece of its collections, Impression, soleil levant [Impression, Sunrise] and pays tribute to it through the exhibition Facing the Sun: The Celestial Body in the Arts from 21 September 2022 to 29 January 2023.
Invited by the Musée Marmottan Monet to establish an artistic dialogue with its collections, the Swiss painter Marc-Antoine Fehr has taken two paintings by Claude Monet as his starting point: Le Pont de l’Europe, Gare Saint Lazare (1877) and Champs d’Iris jaunes à Giverny (1887).
Marc-Antoine Fehr focuses on the narrative potential of these paintings, made possible by the instantaneity of Monet’s vision as he captured these transient scenes, which he painted from life. Playing with this effect, he presents a set of 240 gouaches on three walls of the exhibition space, each measuring 7.5 x 101 cm, with Monet’s two paintings superimposed on them. Begun in 1999 and appropriately titled Le Pays sans fin (Country Without End), this work, which is carried out anew in each venue, is intended to be continued with no scheduled end.
The artist takes visitors on a journey starting at the Gare Saint Lazare, destination unknown. The landscape rushes by, seen through the train window. Like a traveller who only captures a continuous fragment of what he sees, the visitor is unable to take in the entire artwork in one go. Le Pays sans fin invites us to journey physically and visually through the colours of the painting, catching fleeting glimpses of outlines, deserted buildings and silent natural environments.
